Brief Encounter (1945)

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) Two people (Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson) sit in a train depot cafe with few words passing between them, even though the need for words is agonizingly felt. This is a meeting of great import for these two people far beyond the casual and humble setting it is situated in. The time is precious and limited, and words could be balm or weapons, so they are avoided. It is agony, but neither one can avoid this meeting for both of them know it will be the last. And the clock is ticking. And words go unspoken. So much of that.

In Brief Encounter, the near-entirety of the story is told in flashback as a confession that never escapes the heroine's lips. Laura Jesson (Johnson) is considering telling her kind, stable, and decent (but dull) husband of her adultery, but the words go unspoken, flashing only in her mind, like a secret life passing through her mind before it dies. Only the audience is allowed the hearing. Only the audience will know the agony of that first scene.

But, not yet. As Laura and Dr. Alec Harvey (Howard) watch their tea cool and dread last words, they are interrupted by Dolly Messiter (Everley Gregg), a friend of Laura's and oh-so-chatty. Dolly is about to catch a train and what a lovely surprise to see Laura here and oh, how she does prattle on about the most meaningless, silly things and takes up all the oxygen—and time!—in the room, while Laura and Alec can only sit and be polite—it's not her fault, she doesn't know (although Laura will be thinking "I wish you'd stop talking. I wish you'd stop prying and trying to find things out. I wish you were dead - no I don't mean that. That was silly and unkind. But I wish you'd stop talking.") 

"Isn't it awful about people meaning to be kind?" is something she says that might also be applied in the situation. The underlying drama beneath an innocent seeming example of "two's company-three's a crowd" will not be disclosed (and only to us) the length of the picture away, but we get the gist—Dolly Messiter is intruding, but she knows not on what and is much too shallow to care. She might if she knew the possible ramifications it would lead Laura to in the near-future, but only in hind-sight, and there is something in Laura that might want to deny her the satisfaction—as satisfaction has been denied her.

Laura and Dr. Harvey part and there is only a fond hand on the shoulder to serve as a last embrace. He leaves. And as Dolly prattles on, director Lean does something amazing—he tilts the camera on Laura as her thoughts become desperate, and the image is a vertiginous tilt forward, like leaning in but off-kilter like standing on the edge of a precipice and the gravity drawing down, down, down. That tilt will remain as her resolve breaks and she runs out of the shop to the train tracks and a passing train blows her physically back and as it does so, reality —the camera returns to normal, the impulse broken. The world is "righted."

That's a bold move on Lean's part, and serves as a nice visual encompassing of the movie. The world goes off-axis during the affair, which for both parties is a secret double-life—they're both married and both quite proper. They're both racked by guilt for the indiscretion, which is as discreet as can be, as less than a handful of people suspect (and that's all they can do, besides judge), but it is enough to cause misery despite the happiness and longing they can't deny. But, it is played out in private and in the shadows, for fear of it being found out. Anyone will tell you this is common, despite how uncommon it all feels.

After all, in that very cafe, there are flirtations and affections being spouted all the time and at high volumes—particularly between station jobbers played by Sterling Holloway and Joyce Carey—and no one pays any attention to that. And on the platforms, PDA's are rampant and displayed in full, furtive view. In such an environment, guards might be down and desires encouraged. But, that's other people. Dr. Harvey and Laura Jesson are a different class and Society expects more of them, as they expect more of themselves.

Double-edged sword, that. They want more, expect more, but can't have more, and if they succumb, it tends to curl that stiff-upper-lip, even if they know forthright from wrong. Then, the inner dialogue begins, the repercussions, the guilt, the doubt, the shame. More is expected of you by denying yourself. You end up taking a lot of the joy out of it by second-guessing it and second-guessing whether you deserve it or not.

Noel Coward says all this much better than I can. By presenting that inner dialogue as a confession that will never be spoken, it offers the better parts of altruistic honesty without actually committing to it or suffering the consequences. By letting the audience in on the inner thoughts, it makes us co-conspirators and makes us put some skin in the game. And it is such a soaper that it allows the catharsis of tears without letting the figures involved on-screen so much as salt a lapel. They're allowed dignity, even if we have to blow our noses.

Clever little movie, another reason why Coward is revered as a scenarist and Lean a master craftsman. They do all the sneaking around in shadows and we do all the crying. That is a fine romance.

Wild Boys of the Road

Wild Boys of the Road (William Wellman, 1933) Warner Brothers continued their tough Depression era stories with this look at juvenile transiency in the wake of the Depression, where kids who were a burden to their financially strapped families took to the road as hobos rather than going to orphanages or foster homes. With the country in the midst of a vast migration in search for work or to escape the dust-bowl

Tommy Gordon (Edwin Phillips) and Eddie Smith (Frankie Darro) are high school kids who have it pretty good. They go out on double dates with their best girls in Eddie's jalopy and the only thing they have to argue about is who gets the rumble seat. 

But, Tommy has some bad news. He tells Eddie that he's going to drop out of school to look for work so he can help his family. Aw, that's too bad, Tommy, maybe my Dad can help out. Dad can't. Times are hard and Dad Smith has lost his job, too, and he can't help Tommy, he can't even help his own family. Seeing his father in distress and being a good boy, Eddie sells his flivver and gives Dad the $22 bucks he sold it for.

Having given the last of his worldly possessions to his family, and with them facing eviction, Eddie joins up with Tommy in a quest to find work to provide for their families. They jump a train and start riding the rails. They hook up with other boys, learning what they need to in order to avoid the "bulls" on the rail-line looking for any such vagrants using it for free transportation.

One of the "boys" turns out to be a girl—Sally (Dorothy Coonan)—one of the few who disguise themselves as boys to fit in and protect themselves from attack. Sally is on the way to Chicago, where she hopes she can move in with her aunt until she can find work. It's as good a plan as any and Tommy and Eddie run interference for Sally while they make a transition from train to train. Once in Chicago, they find their situation hasn't improved, as work is impossible to find and the local police are picking up vagrants, but Sally gets past it with a note from her aunt and claiming the boys are her cousins.

They make it to Aunt Carrie's (Minnie Gomball), but the stay is short-lived. Seems Aunt Carrie is running a brothel out of her place (Don'cha love pre-Code films?) and the police raid it that night—not a good thing for runaway and vagrants. They beat it out of a window and hook back up with the kids in the rail-yard.

But, life only gets harder for them: one girl, Lola (Ann Hovey) is discovered by a train brakeman (Ward Bond, uncredited probably because the character is so despicable) and raped, which inspires the others to trap the bum and beat him within an inch of his life, leading the brakeman to fall out of a compartment and die a well-deserved death. Once in Columbus, they hop off the train, but Tommy misses his footing, stumbles, and is clocked by a railroad switch and knocked across the tracks.

Wellman stages one of the grittiest set-pieces he ever produced—the other kids watch helplessly as Tommy, unconscious, one leg splayed over the tracks has his foot cut off by a speeding train, crippling him. Only the help of a visiting doctor saves his life as he has to have his leg amputated. Things are tough on the road, and they're only made tougher by Tommy having to make his way with a crutch when speed is of the essence. But, the incidents near Columbus only steel the group of kids making them tougher, bitter, and, rather than running from authority, ready to take it on and fight it.

The group makes it to Cleveland, where they camp in what was called "Pipe-towns" during the Depression—make-shift shelters made from sewer conduits stacked in a supply yard. The kids call it "Sewer Pipe City" and for awhile it's a stable community in the unstable lives of the kids. It's short-lived, however, as authorities move in to take it down to prevent any lawlessness in town, turning water hoses on the group. The past incidences have hardened the young vagrants and they take on the police, beating them back and getting on another train, pelting the law with rocks and whatever else they can use as weapons.

Finally, they end up at the end of the line in New York, living in a municipal dump and things begin to look up, Tommy in line to get a job, if he can just scratch up enough cash to get a decent jacket. But, even that creates complications that get them mixed up with the law and an appearance before a local judge. This gives Eddie a chance to make a bitter speech on their treatment that has an eerie echo recalling the current issue of homelessness: 

I knew all that stuff about you helping us was baloney. I'll tell you why we can't go home--because our folks are poor. They can't get jobs and there isn't enough to eat. What good will it do you to send us home to starve? You say you've got to send us to jail to keep us off the streets. Well, that's a lie. You're sending us to jail because you don't want to see us. You want to forget us. But you can't do it because I'm not the only one. There's thousands just like me, and there's more hitting the road every day.

Wild Boys of the Road was made in 1933, and runs a tight 68 minutes, but its story of Society's way of dealing (or not dealing) with the issues of those souls who have fallen through the cracks of the economic infrastructure still resonates today.

Wild Boys of the Road was voted into the National Film Registry in 2013.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder, 1970) It may be one of the best movies you've never seen. 

There's no mystery to that; no one's seen the full length version of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Conceived in the heady days of the 1960's, with their roadshow presentations (long ago extinct) that played one theater once a night, and in itself was a full evening's entertainment, Private Life was going to be a three hour epic (with intermission) that dramatized four "untold" tales of Sherlock Holmes (Robert Stephens) by his co-hort and longtime companion Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely). But, by the time of its completion, roadshows were no longer good box-office for theaters, Sherlock Holmes didn't seem to appeal to the "young" crowd, and one episode's extensive nudity would have slapped the movie with a restricted rating, further reducing the audience. Why, in the time of movies like M*A*S*H, would anybody want to see a three-hour Sherlock Holmes movie?*

Continuing the work on his monograph on cigarette ash...

So, as sure as Dr. Watson is with a scalpel, Private Life was eviscerated by the producing Mirisch Brothers at the behest of United Artists, the prologue and two of its mysteries hacked away (no complete version remains of these sequences), leaving the third (the Russian ballet story) and the post-Intermission grand story involving the Loch Ness monster, the dead parakeets, the monks, and the midgets as the only evidence of the crime. All that's left are scattered clues of a better film—pieces of scenes hidden away in the "Bonus Materials" of the current DVD, collections of pictures with no soundtrack, soundtracks with no pictures. Elements are lost, stolen or strayed. Wilder was heart-broken, saying that the movie felt longer cut down to 2 hours.**

From here on out, you'll see clues...Clue #1

Truncated and compromised as it is, it is still probably the best Sherlock Holmes movie ever made and that includes the quickie Basil Rathbone's, and the BBC series with the inimitable Jeremy Brett (which has a similar love for the arcana and dusty minutiae of the Holmes canon) and the thousand of impostors who are satisfied with merely the deerstalker, the Inverness cape, the mahogany calabash with meerschaum bowl,*** and the fustiness. Though not "official," and certainly having fun with the Great Detective, it still manages to take Conan Doyle's consulting detective and surround him with an engagingly modern story with the benefits of historical hind-sight.

Clue#2

The movie began as a proposed musical to feature Peter O'Toole as Holmes and Peter Sellers as Watson (!!), but over the course of the '60's, the film evolved into the basic Wilder formula of the unmasking of subterfuge and becoming an only somewhat strait-laced series of adventures. The ones that remain have a sub-text of Holmes' sexuality—he uses his co-habiting with Watson as a means to avoid being a "donor" for a Russian ballerina seeking to produce brilliant prodigy, and his seduction (more like playing along) of Madame Valladon (Geneviève Page) to glean more information—both incidents leaving Watson sputtering indignation—that leave the matter, finally, obliquely melancholy.

That's the "Private" section.

Clue#3

The mystery of the Madame Valladon, found floating in the Thames, and her missing engineer-husband will consume Holmes for the majority of the movie, his motivations conflicted between curiosity, a sense of justice, enticement of the mystery, his conflicted relations (or lack of them) with brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee), and an odd empathy with Valladon. For Watson, it's a welcome relief from hiding the syringe from Holmes. The solution of it will leave the detective even more conflicted, as his actions create a double negation, sending him back to drugs and questioning his abilities.

Clue#4

Despite not being an official Holmes story, it feels more of a tribute than even Conan Doyle's work, for here the focus is on Holmes and less on the poor innocents whose worlds have been invaded by evil and the un-British. As such, it gives us a peek behind the steel curtain of Holmes' reasoning, to show us a bit of the man behind the detective.

Appropriately, what you find is another mystery.

* All I need do to point out the efficacy of the character is to say that he's showing up everywhere—with the successful Robert Downey Jr.-Jude Law movies (and Mr. Holmes featuring Ian McKellan) and two (count 'em) two successful modern dress TV-versions ("Elementary" featuring Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu and BBC's "Sherlock" starring Benedict Cumberbatch and the ubiquitous Martin Freeman) . And lest we forget there was a medical series for many years that featured Holmes in disguise.  The one with the "consulting" physician who can "read" patients and every week has a mystery that even his intellect is challenged to solve, who is a social mis-fit, addicted to narcotics, and has a friend that he sometimes shares quarters with by the name of (ahem) Dr. James Wilson? And as he's not a "Holmes," he's a "House." I'm surprised nobody thought of Hugh Laurie to play Holmes before now? (Probably too identified as "Wooster!")

** It's a strange phenomenon, but it happens—I can vouch for it. Full-length movies that are well-done feel like shorter movies that films that are edited for time. It has something to do with continuity, flow-through of the story-line, cutting rhythm—hard to say. But I do know that sitting through the SIFF premiere presentation of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America in its Paramount studio's strict timeline version seemed interminable, while Leone's original flashback structure, which is a good 45 minutes longer, seems to streak by.

*** Devotee's of the Doyle stories know that Holmes doesn't...and probably wouldn't...use such a pipe, preferring harsh tobaccos that would be disastrously mellowed by the meerschaum bowl. It's only become "the" pipe for Holmes (it's even used in this film's poster!) due to the stage and filmed versions of the Holmes character. Blame William Gillette.